Infallibility

I'm an English teacher. I admit it freely. It's a better occupation than being, say, a drug dealer, but not nearly as much fun.
The problem is that people tend to think that I am the final authority on all things having to do with grammar and language. I get friends who phone me for advice. Sometimes I have to tell them, "It really doesn't make much difference," or "We really don't know," or "since language changes, that's in flux." As an example of the last -- someone asked me recently about the differences between uninterested and disinterested. I replied that traditionally, uninterested meant "having no interest in," and disinterested meant "having no opinion on." I continued that disinterested is acquiring the meaning that was formerly given to uninterested. That is, the sentence, "Charlie was disinterested in the outcome," could mean "Charlie had no opinion about the outcome," or "Charlie didn't care about the outcome."
This elicited puzzled silence. How could it be, my caller asked, that things could change like that? Shouldn't language stay put? Isn't there a proper English somewhere that we can adhere to?
Well, possibly, but "proper" changes. At one time, mob wasn't proper. If I remember right, mob is short for a Latin phrase mobus vulgaris -- "the common people in motion."
We can wish all we want, but the fact is language is changing even as we talk about it.

Meaning is much more

The meaning of a word is very often much more than what you'll learn if you use Webster as your source. Today, playing Scrabble with my sister, I used the word "braless," which you will note, has seven letters.

The dictionary defines braless as, "not wearing a bra."

Wait a minute, though. I'm not wearing a bra, but I wouldn't describe myself as braless. So, there has to be something more to it.

You'll have gotten it now: braless means "Not wearing a bra when it's normal that a person would be wearing one." And it's also clear that braless is a gender-specific word. It applies in all cases to women. There is an episode of Seinfeld in which Kramer invents a bra for men, but in order to specify what it is, he has to invent a name for it. He calls it the "bro." This underlines the fact that women wear bras; men don't.

There are a number of words that have this gender-specificity, though not often as strongly as with braless. The word "oaf," for instance, is always male. There aren't any female oafs. Same for "blockhead" and "dolt." On the other hand, "airhead" and "bubblehead" are female.

You can read into this what you want regarding female and male roles.

Is the game afoot

A friend recently asked me about the term "afoot." His question was, "Could you say, 'I was on a horse and she was afoot'?" Please notice the very tricky punctuation and I think I got it right. Anyway, there were voices in the background and I could tell that a bet was on the line.

"Sure," I said. "It's kind of an old-fashioned word, and we'd probably say 'on foot' today."

After my friend hung up, I wondered what had occasioned the bet. Then I remembered a phrase attributed to Sherlock Holmes, but one he never actually uttered in one of Conan Doyle's stories. It's "The game is afoot."

A game walking? Of course not. In this case, the meaning of the word is "happening." Something is afoot.

So, what we have is a word with two meanings. Actually, it'd probably be more accurate to say that we have two different words which just happened to be spelled the same. The word "run" in "a run of good luck," is clearly connected to the original meaning of the word "run," and can be seen to be a metaphor. Sometimes, though, as with "afoot," the meanings have separated too far. Or, it might be the case that the two words "afoot" in fact come from different roots. I'll have to look that one up.

Comparitive and superlative

One of the quirks of the English language that is dying out is the difference between the comparative and the superlative. Here's how the difference works: Suppose your significant other wants help in choosing a new pair of pants (note how gender neutral this all is?). Now, the SO shows you two pair and asks, "Which pair do you like most?"
That's "wrong" (please note quotation marks). It should be, "Which pair do you like more?"
When discussing two things, we use the comparative: more, better, bigger. It is only when we move to three or more things that we use the superlative: most, best, biggest. Suffice it to say that the usage is dying because it's not very useful.
Normally I can usually think of some historical reason why a really silly rule should be in place, but this one defies any explaining. There are a number of languages in the world that have a kind of three-tiered system for numbering things. It goes one, two, many, as if -- once we get beyond two -- it's just not worth it to be specific. I don't think that's the case here, but with language you never know.
.

Evolution

I was listening to an old recording of Maybelle Carter singing "Wildwood Flower," the other day, and she sang, "I woke from my dream and all idols was clay." What interests me was not the subject/verb agreement (this is Bluegrass, after all), but the "idols was clay." This is an evolution in language.
The original passage is from the Old Testament, and relates to a vision of a statue, and idol, with golden head, silver shoulders, and so on down the torso, until the feet, which were of clay. The vision typifies the "golden age" hypothesis, which states that things were better back then, and got worse as we neared the present, where things are miserable.
The meaning of the idol shifted somewhat through history, coming to mean, in the 20th century, that an idol had "feet of clay," meaning that an admired person had a serious flaw.
As Mother Maybelle sings it, the meaning has shifted again. Now it means that anything which we thought was good has gone bad.
This is the way language works. The shift is not good, not bad, just there.

Spell Check as the Curse of Humankind

Here's a headline from the Money section of the Feb 3 Salt Lake Tribune. Bennett: Ruling won't give big business undo campaign sway.
Did you spot it? The word should be undue, or more than is appropriate. As it stands, the headline seems to say that business might have the power to dismantle campaigns. Well, maybe that's true too.
In this case, the culprit is spell check, which causes us to pay attention only to those words that have the little red squiggly line under them.
So, we need rules for using spell check. I know two:
1) Spell check doesn't cover all words; just the ones in the lexicon. So, unusual words or proper nouns are frequently underlined. The problem is that we often assume that a proper noun, say the name Noam Chomsky, though underlined, is spelled correctly. But all the spell check does is compare the spelling with words in its data banks. It will underline both Noam and Naom. The way to fix this is to put such words into the computer's lexicon and then any deviations will show up. If I put Noam in, then Noam will show up underlined in squiggly red.
2) Spell check won't find words that are correct but spellings different from the one you wanted to use. Undue/undo, and a host of others. Someone, a human preferably, needs to make sure that the computer hasn't missed anything.
Which in the case of today's Tribune, didn't happen.

El or La? Who decides?

I am, for about the 20th time in my life, learning Spanish. I decided to go the vocabulary route this time and got myself a box of flash cards. One of the things I learned is that e-mail is el correro electronico. I've no problem with that, although I really should be shortened to el-C, maybe, in good old American tradition. This is obviously a new word, since e-mail isn't that old. It's masculine (el), I assume, because correro is masculine. So far, so good. But what happens if a noun comes into Spanish that isn't built on a previous noun. Let's say that a word has to be invented for something -- oh, I don't know -- a flist. Would it be el flisto or la flista? The chances are that the item, whatever it is, is neither male nor female, so the choice of grammatical gender is completely open.
I have two questions: First, who decides? Is there a committee set up somewhere that decides, for all Spanish-speaking peoples, what the gender of a noun will be? Second, what are the criteria? Does this committee sit around and debate the issue, with a round of balloting to see what's going to happen?
Here my American language chauvinism shows itself. English got rid of grammatical gender, by and large, 8 or 9 hundred years ago. It's about time Spanish did the same. Then I wouldn't have to learn all those el's and la's.